Unfortunately, after six months of living with Notepad2, some glaring deficiencies began to nag at me. The biggest problem was performance slowing to a crawl on my Athlon 3200+ when I opened a text file larger than a few megabytes. Or the way Notepad2 would go into minute-long convulsions if I tried to search that same file. Now, to be fair, this isn't Florian's fault-- these are limitations of the Scintilla engine he uses to drive his (free!) app.

I don't think it's unreasonable to ask a basic text editing app to have decent performance on largish text files in the 5mb - 100mb range. Although I've been relatively happy with Notepad2, I work with files this size fairly often, so I had no choice but to search for Yet Another Notepad Replacement. I felt guilty emailing Florian with questions since he was already providing such an excellent bit of software completely gratis-- so this time, I figured I'd bite the bullet and purchase something with a more formal support relationship.

I did quite a bit of searching for commercial text editor recommendations from other developers, which turned up the following:

I won't even pretend that I lived with these applications long enough to have an informed opinion about which one is "best". I didn't. I browsed through the screenshots and feature list for each one, and then chose two trial versions for a quick spin. Rather than harping on feature checklists, I tried to consider what I actually do in my existing text editor:

I sometimes edit fairly large text files.

I might use this for lightweight scripting and HTML coding tasks.

I don't need another full-blown IDE (eg, Visual SlickEdit). I have Visual Studio for that.

Based on my prior usage history, I felt that EditPad Pro was the best fit: it's quite fast on large text files, has best-of-breed regex support, and it doesn't pretend to be an IDE. I can even set up custom syntax coloring schemes using regular expressions; there's a large library of predefined regex coloring schemes available for download, along with a nice standalone color scheme editor. EditPad Pro was written by Jan Goyvaerts aka JGSoft, who is also the author of PowerGREP and RegexBuddy. I've recommended both of these regex-centric products in priorposts, so it's probably not too surprising that I think Jan has one of the best text editing apps. Regex-y minds think alike.

As I did with Notepad2, I'll have to live with it for about six months before I can claim to have anything resembling an informed opinion about it. If you're still unconvinced that spending $30 on a fancy text editor is a good idea, there are plenty of freeware alternatives as well. The ones most often mentioned are:

Between these two lists, that covers 90% of the Windows text editors I saw recommended in my research. For the more obscure and/or UNIX based text editors, check out the WikiPedia entry on text editors.